Now we turn to the hate weather report.
A man with a swastika tattoo was charged Thursday with a hate crime for punching another man in the face and yelling a racial slur at him in Fullerton.
The incident happened three days after another man was sentenced to a month in county jail for punching an immigration foe at the “America First!” rally in Laguna Beach last month.
(Not that the two prosecutions are related.)
Tyson Theodore Mayfield, 41, of Fullerton, was charged with felony assault/hate crime causing injury with a sentencing enhancement for a prior strike conviction for mayhem in 2008 in Orange County.
Mayfield, who has a pre-trial hearing scheduled Sept. 15 at the North Justice Center in Fullerton, could get six years in state prison if convicted, according to the Orange County District Attorney’s office (OCDA).
On Monday—Labor Day—he approached a fellow in a commercial parking lot in Fullerton and asked to borrow a lighter. After being told the man had no lighter, Mayfield became “agitated,” called the stranger who is Filipino and Turkish a racial slur and punched him multiple times, the OCDA alleges.
A nearby witness called 9-1-1, Fullerton Police Department officers arrived, and Mayfield was arrested.
He has a swastika tattoo on his right shoulder, prosecutors say.
The America First! rally was Aug. 20, when around 8:40 p.m. a crowd had gathered around a fellow saying something about how being anti-immigrant is not racist or some shit like that.
Richard Daniel Losey, 20, of Lancaster, Ohio, copped to attacking that activist. Losey did not have much of a defense, as you can see from a YouTube video titled “R.C. Maxwell Attacked By Antifa For Trump Loyalism:”
Besides punching the left side of the man’s face, ear and temple area multiple times, Losey later tackled him from behind, punched him some more while he was on the ground and dragged him down the street.
I’m going to go waaaay out on a limb here and say Losey was being lousy!
And loser-y: He pleaded guilty Sept. 1 to one misdemeanor count of battery and was sentenced to 30 days in county jail and three years of informal probation.
Oh, I almost forgot the best part: On Aug. 21, the victim reported the assault to the Laguna Beach Police Department.
The next day, Losey went to LBPD—not to turn himself in but to request transportation assistance to travel back home to Ohio.
“LBPD officers identified the defendant as the suspect in the attack,” says the OCDA, “and arrested him at the police station.”
Genius!
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.